Saturday, February 11, 2017

Kat Brzozowski: Writing YA Romance

Kat Brzozowski is an editor at
Swoon Reads/Feiwel & Friends. She acquires YA for Feiwel & Friends and edits crowdsourced YA manuscripts for Swoon Reads. Previously, she
was an editor at Thomas Dunne Books, a division of St. Martin’s Press. She has
worked on a wide range of young adult fiction, including Anna-Marie
McLemore's When the Moon was Ours, which was longlisted for a
National Book Award, and the new Fear Street books in R.L. Stine’s best-selling
series, which has sold over eighty million copies worldwide.

Kat starts her talk by sharing some
romance writing basics:

You need tension between your
characters, things can't just be easy, and you can't throw in an easy obstacle.
Odds are if a character sees somebody cute on the first page, they are going to
fall for each other, and we do love that familiar beginning, but you still need
to insert real obstacles.

Examples of good obstacles include:
Families at odds; different social or economic classes; past heart breaks
that are impeding current relationships; different priorities and goals or
values (college bound or not for example). What hangs in the balance if they do
or don't get together? The whole world ending or just their relationship?

You can't just have romantic longing
in a story, Kat says, there needs to be actions that unfold in the book that
the romance is tied up in. What sacrifices or changes are they going to make to
stay or begin that relationship?

The emotional states of the
characters will also need to change from beginning to end, and you'll need to
be able to describe physical attraction appropriate to your audience's age.